Mormonism | Science

General Books

This is the second post on the book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (see first post). The broad theme of the book is positive: despite high diversity and high religiosity, Americans manage to get along and generally avoid religious strife. But the book also shows that for more and more Americans, religion is less and less relevant. Politics, it seems, is what really animates and divides us. In this post I'll discuss what the book says about Mormonism in particular, most of that discussion coming in the religion and politics section of the book.

I am reading my way through the hot new book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon & Schuster, 2010). [Note: T&S is running a 12 Questions feature with David E. Campbell, one of the authors of the book.] In the first few chapters, the authors survey how religion in America has changed over the last fifty years, starting with the cultural earthquake of the Sixties, followed by two aftershocks: a conservative retrenchment that peaked in the eighties and then a renewed move away from organized religion that is presently in the ascendant. We're living in the second aftershock.

I am working my way through The Evolution-Creation Struggle, by Michael Ruse, a philosopher at Florida State. That's important: he's not a biologist for whom science can do no wrong and religion can do nothing right, he's a philosopher interested in a broader set of questions about the protracted debate between science and religion. I'll cover topics from the first half of the book in this post.

The first point is that evolution didn't start with Darwin. It was in the air ever since the Enlightenment produced a a general belief in the possibility of human progress. Christians could be as progressive as more secular thinkers. The idea that human effort could and should make the world a better place was a central tenet of postmillennialism and of the social gospel of the late 19th century.

Carl Sagan (1934-1996) recently published a new book. In 1985, he delivered the Gifford Lectures, a year-long Scottish academic appointment designed to promote the study of natural theology. The transcripts of the lectures were lost for many years, but were finally rediscovered, edited, and published in 2006 as the book The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. I found it impossible to read this enjoyable and enlightening book without hearing Sagan's distinctive verbal delivery echoing in my mind as I read the text. I'll touch on a few of the topics he covered: God, the Universe, extraterrestrial life, religion, and Mormonism.